Encrypted files in Dropbox

As we live in the age of smartphones and mobility access to the cloud, the more there is the need to access our files from anywhere. We need our files to be available on any computer, ours (private) or others (public). Traveling with your entire tech equipment is not always a good idea and with the era of cloud you dont need to bring everything with you.

I’ve started to use Dropbox for that reason. I use dropbox as a public digital bucket, to store and share public files. Every digital asset that is online is somehow public and only when you are using end-to-end encryption then you can say that something is more secure than before.

I also want to store some encrypted files on my cloud account, without the need to trust dropbox (or any cloud hosting file provider for that reason). As an extra security layer on top of dropbox, I use encfs and this blog post is a mini tutorial of a proof of concept.

EncFS - Encrypted Virtual Filesystem

(definition from encfs github account)

EncFS creates a virtual encrypted filesystem which stores encrypted data in the rootdir directory and makes the unencrypted data visible at the mountPoint directory. The user must supply a password which is used to (indirectly) encrypt both filenames and file contents.

That means that you can store your encrypted files somewhere and mount the decrypted files on folder on your computer.

Disclaimer: I dont know how secure is encfs. It is an extra layer that doesnt need any root access (except the installation part) for end users and it is really simple to use. There is a useful answer on stackexchange that you night like to read .

View Files on Dropbox

View Files on the Mount Point

Unmount EncFS Mount Point

When you mount the source directory, encfs has an option to auto-umount the mount point on idle.
Or you can use the below command on demand:

$ fusermount -u /home/ebal/Boostnote

On another PC

The simplicity of this approach is when you want to access these files on another PC.
dropbox-client has already synced your encrypted files.
So the only thing you have to do, is to type on this new machine the exact same command as in Create & Mount chapter.